In working on a submission for National Parks magazine, I was reviewing my last two years’-worth of photos from Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve. I found several images I had captured with the hopes of creating panoramic images, but was unable to due to the limitations of the Photomerge capabilities in Adobe Photoshop CS2. With my recent purchase of Arcsoft’s Panorama Maker Pro, I decided to revisit these images. In each case, the full merger of the images into panoramic photos was a complete success.

The feature photo for this post comes from my trip last September down the Noatak River, on one of many perfect weather evenings in the park. The sunrise photo comes from the Alatna River headwaters, where I base-camped for five days in connection with my 2007 Artist-in-Residence experience in the park. The wide, golden, sweeping landscape with lakes shows the convergence of three valleys: the Nigu, the Killik, and the Alatna. Finally, the rugged, mountainous panoramic photo was actually taken while riding in the back seat of an Aviat Husky A1-B aircraft. I worked as hard as I could to keep the camera level as I bounced around in the back, managing to snap off about twenty images that became part of the final pano.

It goes to show that it pays to revisit your work and see what more you can do with it down the road.